ATTILA RICHARD LUKACS

The shaved heads and tightly laced boots got him hot.

And that frisson was strong enough to provide Attila Richard Lukacs with a lifelong subject for his art.

“I first identified with skinheads sexually, because there’s a tremendous sexuality to the look,” Lukacs says. “ The movement is very much about masculinity; the ideal is the male body and the tight brotherhood, with aspects of SM and fetish not far under the surface of straight bonding.”

“In my paintings, boys in the boots are cavorting in a way that is more lyrical —more innocent, I would say — in the expression of their sexulality than one would assume. An that is part of what aroused interest , and kept me so engaged with skins for so long”

Lukacs paints within a tradition of realist portraiture that humanizes subjects, arousing the viewer’s empathy. For many early critics, this approach did not jibe well with depictions of apparent brutality among skinheads, a subculture popularity associated with fascism, homophobia and racism.

“I came onto the scene twenty years ago with large paintings of skins in elaborate tableaus. My work was primarily in dialogue with the influence of Caravaggio. His biblical scences—- whether ostensibly about Matthew or Mark or whomever—- used models who would be recognized by contemporaries as street people or thugs.”

“That let me to paint punks and toughs, which let me to skins. I moved to Berlin to explore the diversity of the skin movement. The media depicted it as a monolithically facist and racist, but in fact there were radical leftist , blacks, women… it was just not as simplistic a movement as media reports would have you believe.”

Five years ago, Lukacs realized that while he had achieved success as a painter, he no longer felt inspired by the near-sexual charged of making art. Painting skins had become his job, a tedious routine.

He decided he needed a new creative challenge. He aid off a year’s rent on his New York studio, put aside his paints and picked up a video camera.
He also picked up crystal meth.

“I wanted to rediscover the pleasure of making stuff, without the concern for whether or not it sold. Instead, I spent a year and half naked in my studio, high 24/7. I hoarded things, as addicts will , and found myself creating an elaborate installation. I threw money and time into it, ignoring that it could never be exhibited or sold.”

“It’s indicative of how far gone I was that at one point, I realize that my installation had grown to block the studio door. It took me three days to get out, during which time I lived off pizzas slid under the door.”

“ I hit bottom, ending up in jail twice. I knew I had to get out of New York. After September 11, I was set on leaving. I hated what had become of lower Manhattan. It was militarized zone; with all the flags and rhetoric, I felt I was trapped in Nazi Germany.”

As Lukacs kicked crystal meth and dismantled his installation, he was followed by cameras documenting his for a film, Drawing Out the Demons (2004), directed by David Vaisbord.

Sobriety was a daunting prospect. “ I moved to Hawaii, seeking the polar opposite of New York. I hadn’t painted in so long, I worried that my ideas had been driven by the mechanism of speed in my head. What if they dried up without drugs? There was a risk , but I had to get my soul back. I had lost it.”

Fortunately, Lukacs’s obsessions were not driven purely by drugs. He was soon drawing feverishly, accumulating sketches and ideas for the paintings he is now making in Vancouver, his birthplace and new home.

Masculinity and the male body remain dominant subjects of Lukacs’s art, though mediated by recovery from the mid-career crisis of faith.
“Painting is a language, and as one becomes more verse in it, one’s knowledge and interest change.”

“Skins became my signature, but one can change signatures during a lifetime. Now, my work is largely in dialogue with itself.”